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Pages tagged "COPS / Metro"


As Ready to Work is Set to Graduate Hundreds, COPS/Metro Presses for More Hiring

Posted on News by West/Southwest IAF · June 30, 2023 11:29 AM

[Excerpt]

COPS/Metro Alliance, the longtime coalition that advocates for working families and is in many ways responsible for the program’s existence, continues to raise concerns.

Read more

In Wake of Legislature's Failure on Gun Safety, COPS/Metro Organizes for Local Reform

Posted on News by West / Southwest IAF · May 22, 2023 2:23 PM



[Excerpt]

"Our state legislators cannot muster the courage to act on the will of the people. Why? They fear the vocal minorities who have made gun possession an idol worthy of greater reverence than the lives of our fellow citizens. This is an abomination before God.

Frustrated by the cowardice and inaction of the state legislators, San Antonio congregations are now working to reduce gun violence. Under the banner of COPS/Metro Alliance, 175 church leaders united to ask city of San Antonio and Bexar County leadership to create a public education campaign emphasizing gun owners’ responsibility to store their firearms safely and to provide safe handgun storage boxes for vehicles.

It’s past time for lawmakers to come to their senses and listen to the residents they represent."

[Photo Credit: Pictures Left: Rev. Rob Mueller. Sam Owens, San Antonio Express News]

Texas Lawmakers Fail the Courage Test on Guns, San Antonio Express News [pdf]

 


Texas IAF Rally Takes On "Vampire" Chapter 313 Legislation

Posted on News by West/Southwest IAF · April 03, 2023 4:40 PM

[Excerpt]

A surprising legislative success in 2021 is on track to be undone in 2023, unless a grass roots left-right coalition can block legislation and the forces behind it that are trying to go backward....

In the name of jobs and economic development, a 2012 tax code trick called Chapter 313 essentially funneled state money, via school district property tax breaks, to private companies doing new industrial construction. The school districts that granted tax breaks under Chapter 313 were reimbursed — and many still are being reimbursed — by the state, meaning we as taxpayers reimbursed them. It was the ultimate insider game of channeling public benefit to private companies.

The [Texas] Industrial Areas Foundation cleverly brought a man dressed as Dracula to its rally to dramatize how Chapter 313 unfairly drained school districts of funds and that reviving this bad economic development deal would be akin to raising the undead.

Read more

National Gathering of Ministers Features COPS/Metro Collaboration w/San Antonio Archdiocese

Posted on News by West / Southwest IAF · February 03, 2023 3:33 PM

CSM_Plenary_Gathering_-_3_Speakers_-_with_quote_and_color_(3).png

At a national gathering of Catholic Social Ministers organized by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), COPS/Metro's work with San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller was featured prominently in plenary sessions and a workshop around local organizing for gun safety reform. 

During a panel discussion with the Archbishop, Josephine Lopez-Paul shared how COPS/Metro worked with the San Antonio Archdiocese in the aftermath of the massacre at Uvalde in 2022.  The Archbishop made an impassioned plea to infuse love into a "culture of death" through faithful participation in the political process around issues impacting life, including gun safety reforms. 

Read more

Ready to Work SA Earns Its Hype in San Antonio

Posted on News by West / Southwest IAF · August 29, 2022 11:48 AM

[Excerpt from San Antonio Report]

U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh heaped praise on San Antonio’s city government for its expansive workforce development program, often called the largest of its kind in the country.  He said he wishes the federal government could do more.

At a roundtable discussion with local industry leaders and city officials Monday, Walsh called SA Ready to Work — the city’s $230 million program aiming to train thousands of low-wage workers for middle-class careers over the next five years — innovative and exemplary for its heavy collaboration with industry leaders.....

SA Ready to Work opened for enrollment in May, though many pre-registered. In the nearly four months since then, slightly more than 5,400 applicants have signed up — nearly fulfilling what the city anticipated to be enrollment through its entire first year.

Outpacing both contractors so far is Project Quest, the jobs training nonprofit that [like SA Ready to Work] sprang out of COPS/Metro.  Project Quest is managing the cases of 112 participants.

[Photo Credit: Alamo Colleges]

Labor Secretary Would Like to See Bigger Federal Investments in Ready to Work, San Antonio Report [pdf]

U.S. Secretary of Labor visits the Alamo Colleges District, Alamo Colleges District [pdf]


COPS/Metro Cited in Express-News for Training Generations of Leaders

Posted on News by West/Southwest IAF · March 07, 2022 10:09 AM

[Excerpt]

The book includes critical assessments of the status of Mexican Americans, none as important, in my judgment, as the emergence of “a professional and academic voice” among Latinos and the rise of major institutions to advocate for Mexican Americans and defend their rights.

Many of those institutions were born in San Antonio, including...COPS Metro, which has trained generations of community activists.

[Photo Credit: Matthew Busch, San Antonio Express-News]

Mexican Americans' Fight for Equality Not Over, San Antonio Express-News [pdf]


COPS/Metro Leader Virginia Mata Profiled in HEB Foundation Magazine

Posted on News by West/Southwest IAF · November 17, 2021 4:45 PM

[Excerpt]

Everyone in San Antonio knows about flash floods—“Turn Around, Don’t Drown” signs are familiar on certain roads. But in the West Side, a neighborhood established by Mexican Americans who were restricted from more resourced neighborhoods north of downtown, floods were far more commonplace.

“I remember as kids getting pulled out of the [family] station wagon [that almost got swept away],” Mata said. “We were at the time like five or six, I think. But yeah, we didn’t know that was not normal.”

Mata says when you grow up experiencing poverty, “you accept it, normalize it, and blame yourself for it.” What seems normal at the time becomes absurd when you reflect back on it as an adult.

Mata speaks softly and with a kind of wisdom that comes from navigating barriers early in life..... 

Mata is retired from two careers—one in federal law enforcement, and another as a lietenant [sic] commander in the Navy Reserves. Nowadays, she spends a lot of her time with COPS/Metro, a community organizing coalition that gathers people from churches, schools, businesses and unions to represent the needs of families and children. Over the last year, Mata and her COPS/Metro partners have spurred the City of San Antonio to create and invest in a workforce training program designed to support people seeking higher-paying jobs.

Retirement from her final job as a probation officer in Del Rio in 2018 brought her back to San Antonio, where she bought a house near Sea World that is still a close enough drive to her old stomping grounds. Those stomping grounds include Holy Family Church, Mata’s church growing up, which is also where COPS/Metro was born.

The coalition’s first fight, all those decades ago? Demanding that the city fix the West Side’s drainage issues.

Mata’s story is coming full circle....

[Photo Credit: Echoes]

Someone Like Virginia, Echoes [pdf]


San Antonio Express-News Names COPS/Metro & Ernesto Cortes Jr. 'Visionaries Guided by Service'

Posted on News by West/Southwest IAF · August 05, 2021 6:09 PM

[Excerpt]

Cities are transformed through the imaginations of people seeing what their communities can become. Cities are also transformed through the moral imaginations of people seeing clearly how their communities are in the present.

Visionaries peering into the future imagine expanded skylines, glittering downtowns, state-of-the-art stadiums, new businesses and the fusion of human capital and technologies, which earn cities the titles of “great,” “modern,” and “world-class.”

...

The Basin was essential and a springboard for the city’s economic growth, but it did nothing to protect the West Side from floods whose muddy waters, for decades, would continue to overflow ditches and rush through its neighborhoods, often claiming more lives. These floods and the lack of drainage they highlighted led to the 1974 founding of Communities Organized for Public Service (known as COPS) by the master community organizer Ernesto Cortes, a son of the West Side.

Believing in the natural leadership in neighborhoods and churches, the organization (now COPS/Metro ) was made up of more than two dozen parishes in which people, no matter their income or education, learned they could be sources of light to illuminate and find solutions to their problems.

Armed with passion, knowledge of the issues and a newly developed fearlessness in confronting city and corporate leaders, they discovered an ability to correct inequities such as bonds being approved for West Side drainage projects but never spent on those projects.

[Photo Credit: San Antonio Express News]

Visionaries Guided by Service, San Antonio Express News [pdf]


Incumbents Who Participated in COPS/Metro Accountability Assembly Win Re-election. Non-Incumbent Candidates Advance to Runoff

Posted on News by West / Southwest IAF · May 04, 2021 12:41 PM

[Excerpts]

"At a recent 'accountability session' staged by the influential COPS/Metro organization, candidates were asked to commit to a number of positions, including several regarding police discipline. A key one was this: “Would the candidates “commit to only voting in support of a police contract that does the following: Ensures that the chief can hold officers accountable and that arbitrators will only have the ability to rule on the facts of the case, and not be able to overturn officer disciplinary action?”
Saying yes were the mayor, three incumbent council members who won reelection Saturday, both candidates in two runoffs, and the candidates who led in two other runoffs. That’s eight of the 11 council members. The other three, for districts 8, 9, and 10, did not participate in the COPS/Metro event."

Rick Casey: A Very Strange Election in San Antonio, San Antonio Report


Solid Advice for Erik Walsh: Talk to the Nun

Posted on News by West / Southwest IAF · April 13, 2021 6:14 AM

Back in 1992, she was an organizer for COPS/Metro Alliance when the powerful community organization designed and persuaded the City to financially back Project Quest, which early on and to this day has been recognized as one of the most successful job training programs in the country. In 2011, when Project Quest was plagued with controversy from failings due not to corruption but to incompetence, Sister Pearl was brought in to turn it around. She did and ran the organization for six years.

Now the City of San Antonio is embarking on SA: Ready to Work, a program approved by the voters last November that will spend $154 million over five or six years in an effort to train the city’s working poor for good-paying jobs that the city is now generating.

[Photo Credit: Nick Wagner/San Antonio Report]

Solid Advice For Erik Walsh: Talk To The Nun, San Antonio Report [pdf]


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